Safeena Husain

Safeena Husain is the Founder and Board Member of Educate Girls (EG), an Indian non-profit working towards empowering communities for girls’ education in some of the hardest-to-reach villages. Under Husain’s guidance, EG has enrolled 950,000+ girls to date, impacting over 11.5 million+ beneficiaries.

Most recently, when the global pandemic hit India in 2020, EG under Husain’s leadership distributed ration to poverty-struck households in rural India. With the second-wave creating a massive loss of livelihood in India, EG restarted its Covid Relief Initiative to distribute ration and hygiene kits 200,000+ households to date, while running awareness campaigns and amplifying the use of government learning applications. To combat the impact of Covid19 on children’s education, especially girls, EG started Camp Vidya – a community-based learning initiative. Piloted by Husain, 17,000+ camps were completed, improving learning outcomes for children.

A London School of Economics graduate, Husain worked extensively with underserved communities in South America, Africa and Asia, before returning to India. Her efforts to bridge the gender gap in education in India has been instrumental in EG achieving a major global milestone – the world’s first Development Impact Bond in education. On its completion, the bond surpassed both its target outcomes by achieving 160% of its learning target and 116% of its enrolment target. These results are testimony to the commitment of EG to deliver quality at scale (the organisation currently has 2,226 full time employees and 15,000+ community volunteers) and value to every single child in the program. She has also been instrumental in EG becoming the first Audacious project in Asia, a first-of-its-kind coalition that surfaces and funds critical projects with the potential to create global change.

In 2020, EG’s solution to empower 1.5M girls to go to school was selected at MIT Solve’s Learning for Girls & Women Challenge. EG also became one of world’s 100 most inspiring innovations in K12 education twice in a row in 2021. Husain has been conferred with many accolades for her work at grassroots which includes the 2017 NITI Aayog’s Women Transforming India Award, the 2016 NDTV-L’Oréal Paris Women of Worth Award.